Subject: Re: Subject: RE: [RC]
Rehydrating your horse's skin and coat
At 02:16 PM 3/11/2009, Kathy Mayeda wrote:
Sooooo Karen - I never heard the
thin skinned horses being the best for endurance. Does that have
something to do with heat transference?
I have no idea, but I
have read that somewhere and had people more experienced than myself tell me
that - could be all fiction for all I know, but I have had horses that are
more skin sensitive than others and those are usually the better
recover-ers. To me sensitive skinned just means that you have to be
really careful to get sweat cleaned off of them, keep their armpits washed off
in all types of weather and that I need to be a little more delicate when
brushing or currying. Oh, and also very careful about fly sprays or other
topicals - always test first.
I checked out that study on skin tenting
and really, it probably doesn't mean much for our endurance horses.
Looks like out of 60 horses used in that study, 33 of them had a body
condition score of a 1 as this research was done on working horses in
Pakistan. I think that most of us would recognition that something
wasn't quite right if our horses had a BCS of a 1. ;)
http://vip.vetsci.usyd.edu.au/contentUpload/content_2873/VerityAmbler.pdf Pritchard et
al. (2006) found that skin-tenting
was not an accurate method of predicting clinical dehydration because
horses with low body-condition scores (BCS) (those with BCS=1 comprised 33
of 60 horses in the study) were more likely to show positive skin tenting
regardless of their behaviour or blood results.
What
is more useful for us I think is to know what parameters are normal for our
own horses, that way if something changes we'll know what normal is, or
pre-ride conditions were to compare to. If a vet gives my horse a C on
gut sounds and he's eating super well then I won't worry as much as I would if
the vet gave my horse an A on gut sounds and my horses was staring off into
the distance not interested in food. Same thing for the skin tent or
other hydration scores - if the horse has been drinking and his pee looks good
and things are going well then I'm less likely to be concerned if I don't get
an A over if I do get an A and I don't think the horse is behaving
normally.
